On Get Closer, Linda Ronstadt turned The Exciters‘ urgent Tell Him from a teenage command into a grown singer’s act of nerve.
Linda Ronstadt‘s version of Tell Him appeared on her 1982 album Get Closer, a record produced by Peter Asher during the Asylum years and released at a point when Ronstadt had already shown how flexible an American pop song could become in the right voice. The choice mattered. The Exciters had made Tell Him famous with their 1962 single, a bright, driving New York pop-soul record written by Bert Berns, credited as Bert Russell. By early 1963, their recording had become a Top 5 hit in the United States, carried by a rhythmic urgency that felt like advice delivered before courage could disappear.
The original Tell Him belongs to that charged moment when early-sixties girl-group pop could sound both polished and impatient. It was not a quiet confession. It was a push. The song’s premise is simple: if you love him, say it. Do not wait for the room to become perfect, do not hide behind pride, do not let silence pretend to be dignity. In The Exciters‘ hands, that message arrives with youthful force, all forward motion and emotional certainty. It is a song that understands the pressure of a feeling before it understands the consequences.
Ronstadt’s cover on Get Closer does not try to freeze that 1962 feeling under glass. That was rarely her way with older material. Across the 1970s and early 1980s, she built a major part of her career by stepping into songs that already had histories and refusing to treat them as museum pieces. You’re No Good, When Will I Be Loved, Blue Bayou, It’s So Easy, and Ooh Baby Baby were all connected to earlier voices, earlier radios, earlier rooms. Ronstadt’s gift was not simply that she could sing them beautifully. It was that she could make them sound as if they had traveled through time and arrived with a new bruise, a new shape, a new reason to be heard.
That is what makes her Tell Him so interesting. On Get Closer, the song no longer feels only like a teenager urging a friend toward romance. Ronstadt brings a firmer edge to it, a sense that the words have passed through experience. The command is still there, but it carries a different weight. Where The Exciters made the song leap, Ronstadt lets it stand its ground. She does not drain the record of energy; she redirects it. The excitement becomes less breathless, more deliberate. The plea becomes a kind of test: how much honesty can a person actually bear to speak out loud?
The album context deepens that effect. Get Closer arrived just before Ronstadt made one of the boldest turns of her career, moving into the pre-rock American songbook with What’s New and her orchestral collaborations with Nelson Riddle. Heard from that angle, her cover of Tell Him sits near a threshold. She was still working in the rock and pop language that had made her one of the most recognizable female singers of her era, but her interpretive instincts were already reaching beyond genre. She was listening not only for hooks and choruses, but for emotional architecture: where a phrase tightens, where a note needs restraint, where a familiar lyric can suddenly feel adult.
There is also something revealing in the way Ronstadt approached covers from the early rock and soul period. She did not behave as though the past were fragile. She entered it with confidence, even appetite. A song like Tell Him could have been treated as a fun throwback, a quick nod to the radio memories of a previous generation. Instead, Ronstadt makes the tune feel connected to her own larger question as a singer: how do you honor the source without vanishing inside it? Her answer was often to keep the skeleton of the song intact while changing the emotional temperature. The listener recognizes the tune, but the air around it feels different.
In her voice, the title phrase becomes more than encouragement. It becomes a refusal to let feeling remain decorative. Ronstadt had a way of singing direct language without making it sound simple. She could place power behind a line and still leave room for vulnerability, which is why her best covers rarely feel like exercises in vocal display. They feel chosen. Tell Him gives her a brisk, compact frame, and she uses that frame to show how much can happen inside an apparently straightforward pop song. The beat moves; the message stays clear; yet underneath it is the old human hesitation that makes the song keep working.
That is the quiet strength of this Get Closer performance. It reminds us that a cover version is not only a tribute and not only a revival. Sometimes it is a conversation across years. The Exciters captured the spark of the first command, the instant when desire seems urgent enough to outrun doubt. Linda Ronstadt returned to that same command two decades later and made it sound more seasoned, more forceful, and perhaps more aware of what can be lost by waiting. The song still says, tell him. In Ronstadt’s version, it also seems to ask why the truth so often needs to be pushed out of us before we dare to say it.
